Package: wnpp
Greetings,
I'm afraid my last piece of alpha hardware has gone out the door, and I
am no longer a linux-alpha or debian-alpha user. :-( I'll have fond
memories of the machines and of lists like this one and linux-alpha, as
this was my first Linux platform, and my demonstration of its
performance/price in the late 90s initiated a Linux transition at my
former employer, in no small part thanks to the volunteer help I got,
and hopefully gave back.
Oh well. More importantly for this list, I am no longer able to
maintain the DEC->Compaq->HP alpha compiler and math library installers,
nor the "free fast math" libffm of Goto and Wesner. Unfortunately this
means I need to orphan them, and hope they find a maintainer.
libffm should be in good shape and, as far as I know, need little to no
maintenance at all, unless someone wants to add to the library.
Upstream has long since stopped supporting it, and though some of its
code has migrated to glibc, it has some unique and extremely
fast/powerful vectorized functions. For example dsqrtiv() very rapidly
performs 1/sqrt(x) for an array of doubles; this function on the fastest
alpha may still be faster than glibc on the fastest Xeon or Opteron for
this purpose.
As for the others, because a three year campaign to get Compaq to let me
distribute the non-free libraries and (encrypted) compilers hit dead
ends, the biggest maintenance hassle is updating the debconf templates
to keep track of the elusive download URLs. They also have template
translation bugs open which I never got to, and which will be dealt with
by NMUs around the end of this month; apologies to the translation
authors for the delay. These too are long since abandoned by upstream,
and gcc/glibc have been catching up to them in performance, so their
need is not clear at this point.
Sorry about the sudden nature of this right before the etch release. I
should have anticipated the effect of this change on my packages long
ago and done something preemptive about it. :-(
Best wishes for the continued upkeep of this great architecture and
platform!
Regards,
-Adam
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